MGF,Bugatti Veyron or Audi TT???

I was in Newcastle Under Lyme today and had parked up in preparation for my usual visit to the job centre to sign on.

In the car park there was a vehicle that had the colours of a bugatti veyron, a simiar shape to an audi tt but looks like it was sitting on an mgf chasis...

Here are the pics of the original vehicles against the pictures I took.

Bugatti Veyron

Audi TT

MGF

Netbook Woes and linux to the rescue

I recently had to send my EEE PC (904ha/xp) back to Asus to resolve an issue. Unlike other laptops I have had in the past there seem an issue with this machine in that the battery was never 100% charged. I read online about the issue and they all referred to contacting Asus for a swap out.

Although the laptop was on charge for over 48 hours constant, or it is was being used on the mains the led light for the power was always red/orange. On reading the manual it said that this colour indicated the battery was between 80-100% capacity. A solid green indicated 100% capacity.

After several emails to Asus it was agreed to send the unit back for repair. I prepped the machine for delivery by backing it up with Ghost as I didn't want to waste three days rebuilding it again. Wiped the hard drive clean and sent it back. Two days later it was returned...

The note inside from the engineer said LED lights displaying correctly, no OS on Hard drive so reinstalled OS.

This is where my confusion started...... I called Asus on a non 0870 number obtained through www.saynoto0870.com and got through to the wrong department. After conversation with an engineer he advised that the manual for the laptop had been rewritten and that the operation of the LED was correct. So the hassle of returning it was a wasted exercise.

This is when the fun started with the restore.....

Because I had 4 partitions - 1. Windows XP, 2. Ubunutu Boot, 3. EXT3 of Home and 4. of restore disk for windows xp.

Although ghost had backed up everything the restore would not be straight forward as I needed to boot into ghost to restore partitions 2,3,4 then restore 1. However I needed to have partition 1. up and running to get partition 1. restored. Because there was no cd drive I couldn't boot a windows set up cd so "I was up a stream without a paddle"

On looking for a way to create a bootable windows partition on USB I came across a concept online of using a host linux OS with a VMWARE Windows session with direct access to the local hard drive. It would work with me booting into linux, running a vmware product which was a windows installation that would then have raw access to the local c drive in the machine. Because the vmware would use ISO files of the CD installations this would get around the issue of no cd drive.

I opted for easy peasy linux 1, on an 8gb memory card with Sun Virtual Box installed. I had to create a virtual hard disk raw file pointing to the local hard drive in the netbook. Albeit slow, I was able to restore the original parition 1 using a symantec livestate demo cd iso. Reinstall the original bootsector and MBR with a windows recovery session (again in virtualbox) to both remove GRUB and allow the original windows to boot.

Before booting back into the windows I recreated both ext3 linux partition (2 & 3) as blank areas. Booted into partition 1, restored partition 2,3 & 4 using the ghost. I then rebooted back into linux and ran the livestate cd to reinstall partition 1 again to ensure GRUB was installed.

Overall it took over one day and has been a success. Further I now also have a bootable memory card which can be used as a bootable USB stick. This will also allow to run a windows environment under VM (as long as the host PC is powerful enough) to run either Windows or Linux utilities.

AV and Spyware - Free or Commecial?

I was at a friends last night giving their PC a check over - I would call this more akin to a yearly car service. My friend asked the question I usually get - what security protection do you use?

Nowadays being a linux user I have AV installed but don't use it in realtime and either use the built in linux firewall or rely on my router's firewall. Due to the lack of linux based malware or viruses I am confident this will keep my machine clear but am still wary what I either download or click on. In time this may change as more people begin to use linux but now it is relatively secure. I mentioned this to my friend but did say on the two windows machines that I have I use freely available products such as Free AVG and spybot. Using these and being wary what is either being downloaded or clicked on are usually sufficient to catch most things.

My friend was running McAffee that was bundled with his broadband provider but costs per year. He was quite surprised to find that Spybot found something and then asked why did McAffee miss it? I explained this could either be that his AV doesn't know about it or is not set up to catch these items. I reiterated my first point that I do not see the point in paying for these products when there good products freely available.

When I was managing the IT within a business I have used enterprise products from Symantec, McAffee and Sophos - Whilst they all "sort of" worked there were many issues related to not downloading the updates to the machines correctly, sometimes stopping machines from working or the AV not working at all because one of the critical components had not started. I have previously written scripts or created bespoke systems to resolve some of these issues after becoming increasingly frustrated with the supplier not being able to give me a working resolution. I believe if there were free AV and spyware tools available for the enterprise which included deployment and management tools that these coupled with a managed locked down environment, that this should be sufficient to tackle most malware/virus threats.
However there isn't and of course the big companies have invested in their products so need to make their money back and continue to provide a service.

For the home user I have found my strategy of using the freely available tools and with a little education then this should be sufficient. I am not saying people should not purchase the commercial tools, but have found these tools put a false sense of security on people that they will magically resolve all issues when realistically people should manage their systems. It is a like having a car, you take it for an mot, you take for a service and then you usually look out for noises or other signs that the vehicle might not be working correctly. Again this is the same with a PC and people should look out for issues and seek professional guidance when they are unsure. My friend did this, we found something and now everything is okay.

What I really hate about the commercial tools is their over complexity and reliance on so many components in order to run. Whilst I know viruses/malware are becoming more clever, is it really necessary to make these tools more complex so that they can fall over more?

Spybot and Free AVG are examples of simple tools that just work and there is nothing complex. They cover the basics in security but it is a real shame that the commercially available security tools do not follow the principle keep it simple.

Facebook Part 2

You then need to convert your atom feed into an RSS one. I used feedburner then followed the below.

http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/creating-rss-feed-for-your-blogspot-blog/

Face Book

I have just followed this guide to see if I can add my blog updates to face book.

http://weblogs.about.com/od/socialnetworking/ht/AddBlogFacebook.htm

This is a test to see if it works

Nokia 5800 16gb micro SD HC compatibility

I have recently started a new topic post over at my-symbian about the 16gb compatibility of the Nokia 5800XM.

The link to the thread is http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=359029#359029

It appears there are several others having this issue but I have not seen any official postings/news items regarding it.

Whilst I can use my 8gb card in the phone it does limit how much I can store and render the 16gb card I had as useless. However it does ask one question is the phone genuinely compatible with 16gb or higher or can it be fixed in a new firmware?

Lets hope we hear something soon.

Suv Tent

My car is a Nissan X-Trail 4x4.

I have often thought the back is big enough to sleep in but it would be nicer to have a litte more room.

I came across the following link on the x-trail digest for a suv tent.

http://tinyurl.com/SUVtent

Although it is expensive I like the idea and hope they do come down in price.

Sent from my Nokia Tube